LeadingAgile SoundNotes: an Agile Podcast

This file is audio only. The video version can be found here: https://vimeo.com/229799105 At Agile 2017, Johanna Rothman and Mike Griffiths sat down with Dave to talk about the work they've been doing on the PMI Agile Practice Guide. Their work was part of a joint effort between the Agile Alliance and PMI and is intended to offer guidance for traditional PMs on how to begin applying Agile in their work. The PMI Agile Practice Guide will be released in September 2017.

In this week's SoundNotes, Tim Wise joins Dave Prior for a short conversation about Stretch Goals. Even is this is a topic you have a strong opinion about, this podcast has valuable information for you. Before the end the discussion, Tim offers up a version of stretch goals that is positive and healthy for a team. SHOW NOTES 02:35 Podcast Begins 02:44 Topic Intro: Stretch Goals 03:20 Tim’s initial thoughts on Stretch Goals at Team and Portfolio Level 06:08 Technical Debt 06:39 The difference between stretch goals and having a well groomed backlog full of “sprint ready” items 08:40 The lazy queue 09:13 Dave’s thoughts on Stretch Goals 10:31 A story of stretch goals gone wrong 11:30 The Stretch Goal Paradox explained 12:40 The negative Scrum team is not a knife you want to sharpen 13:12 Slack Resources and planning for personal slack which will be used for personal growth 17:38 Planning Healthy Stretch Goals to invest in giving the team more flexibility. 18:22 It’s not always about points. 21:00 Atlanta Scrum User Group update HBR ARTICLE The Stretch Goal Paradoxhttps://hbr.org/2017/01/the-stretch-goal-paradox Atlanta Scrum User Group https://www.meetup.com/agile-38/?https=on CONTACTING TIM LeadingAgile http://www.leadingagile.com/guides/tim-wise/ WiseAgile http://www.wiseagile.com Tim on Twitter https://twitter.com/timswise Tim on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/timwise CONTACTING DAVE LeadingAgile: http://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/ Email: dave.prior@leadingagile.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/mrsungo Personal Blog: http://drunkenpm.net LEADINGAGILE CSM & CSPO CLASSES For information on LeadingAgile’s upcoming public CSM and CSPO classes, please go to: http://www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/ Use the discount code: LA_Podcast to receive a 15% discount on the class. FEEDBACK/QUESTIONS If you have comments on the podcast, or have questions for the LeadingAgile coaches that you’d like to have addressed in a future episode of LeadingAgile’s SoundNotes, you can reach Dave at dave.prior@leadingagile.com

LeadingAgile's Chief Cultural Officer, Rachel Howard, joined Dave for this pre-Agile 2017 podcast to focus on providing tips for folks who are heading to Agile 2017 in search of work. It's the biggest Agile event of the year. If you are looking for a new gig, this may be the best place to find it. SHOW NOTES (this is a pretty brief podcast, so no timed show notes this week) During the interview Rachel and Dave discuss: - Prep work to do before you leave for Orlando - Some do's and don'ts for job hunting while you are at Agile 2017 - Setting realistic expectations and goals - The importance of follow up At the end of the interview Rachel offers some tips for first time attendees at Agile 2017. LEADINGAGILE AT AGILE 2017 Mike Cottmeyer's Sessions - Agile Transformations Explained
Tuesday, August 8 3:45 PM - Faster Food and a Better Place to Sleep: Applying Agile Outside Software
Wednesday, August 9, 10:45 AM Paul Argiry's Session - Avoiding the Pitfalls of Capitalizing Software in an Agile World
Tuesday, August 8 3:45 PM Rick Austin's Session - Portfolio Management in an Agile World
Tuesday, August 8 10:45 AM CONTACTING RACHEL LeadingAgile https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/rachel-howard/
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelhoward/
Twitter https://twitter.com/agilerecruiter CONTACTING DAVE LeadingAgile: http://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/
 Email: dave.prior@leadingagile.com
 Twitter: http://twitter.com/mrsungo
 Personal Blog: http://drunkenpm.net LEADINGAGILE CSM & CSPO CLASSES For information on LeadingAgile's upcoming public CSM and CSPO classes, please go to: http://www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/ Use the discount code: LA_Podcast to receive a 15% discount on the class. FEEDBACK/QUESTIONS If you have comments on the podcast, or have questions for the LeadingAgile coaches that you'd like to have addressed in a future episode of LeadingAgile's SoundNotes, you can reach Dave at dave.prior@leadingagile.com

At Agile 2017, LeadingAgile Principal Consultant, Rick Austin, will lead a session that focuses on how organizations can transform their Portfolio Management from an approach that is more closely aligned with waterfall to an approach that is better able to support Agile. In this podcast Rick outlines some of the key concepts he will be digging in to during the session and then he and Dave discuss some of the challenges that come along with this aspect of transformation, like governance, prioritization and how work flows through the organization. SHOWNOTES This is a fairly short podcast (10:42) so no ShowNotes this week. RICK AUSTIN at AGILE 2017 Portfolio Management in an Agile World Tuesday, August 8, 10:45 AM CONTACTING RICK LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/rick-austin/ Email: rick@leadingagile.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/rickaustin CONTACTING DAVE LeadingAgile: http://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/ Email: dave.prior@leadingagile.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/mrsungo Personal Blog: http://drunkenpm.net LEADINGAGILE CSM & CSPO CLASSES For information on LeadingAgile’s upcoming public CSM and CSPO classes, please go to: http://www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/ Use the discount code: LA_Podcast to receive a 15% discount on the class. FEEDBACK/QUESTIONS If you have comments on the podcast, or have questions for the LeadingAgile coaches that you’d like to have addressed in a future episode of LeadingAgile’s SoundNotes, you can reach Dave at dave.prior@leadingagile.com.

In this week’s podcast, LeadingAgile Founder and CEO Mike Cottmeyer shares his thoughts on how Agile Transformation has been evolving, common patterns of transformation, what steps an organization needs to take to become fit for transformation, and to develop the optionality needed to fulfill the promise of Agile. SHOW NOTES The list of show notes was too long to fit into the SoundCloud listing. To view the ShowNotes for this podcast, please visit https://www.leadingagile.com/podcast/mike-cottmeyer-e…e-transformation/ Links from the Podcast: Switch - Chip and Dan Heath http://amzn.to/2tenVOE LeadingAgile on YouTube http://bit.ly/2uRq1X2 LeadingAgile on Periscope http://bit.ly/2sQt4xb Agile 2017 LeadingAgile Sessions Mike Cottmeyer Sessions Agile Transformations Explained http://bit.ly/2sPQNO4 Tuesday, August 8 3:45 PM Faster Food and a Better Place to Sleep: Applying Agile Outside Software http://bit.ly/2uiLoDt Wednesday, August 9, 10:45 AM Paul Argiry Session Avoiding the Pitfalls of Capitalizing Software in an Agile World http://bit.ly/2vcFtfE Tuesday, August 8 3:45 PM Rick Austin Session Portfolio Management in an Agile World, http://bit.ly/2t43rx8 Tuesday, August 8 10:45 AM Contacting Mike LeadingAgile https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/mike-cottmeyer/ LInkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/cottmeyer/ Twitter https://twitter.com/mcottmeyer Contacting Dave LeadingAgile: http://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/ Email: dave.prior@leadingagile.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/mrsungo
Personal Blog: http://drunkenpm.net LeadingAgile CSM & CSPO Classes For information on LeadingAgile’s upcoming public CSM and CSPO classes, please go to: http://www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/. Use the discount code: LA_Podcast to receive a 15% discount on the class. Feedback/Questions If you have comments on the podcast, or have questions for the LeadingAgile coaches that you’d like to have addressed in a future episode of LeadingAgile’s SoundNotes, you can reach Dave at dave.prior@leadingagile.com

This week Devin Hedge joins Dave Prior for another student question. This time about architecture and if the complexity of it would be better served by a waterfall approach: The Question: "How to plan for the Architecture effectively. With waterfall, we try to figure out all aspects of the business and the technical solution in advance before we start development. In Agile, we discover as we go. It's very likely that when we come to a certain, we'll find either the current business logic or the current technical framework cannot adapt our upcoming demands. There's a high opportunity that we'll need to destroy all the work that we've done. Talking in this perspective, isn't waterfall better than Agile?" Show Notes 00:08 Interview Begins 00:51 This week’s question 02:00 What do we mean by architecture 02:29 The design principles and standards you need in place to support your work 03:35 If it isn’t loosely coupled, neither waterfall or agile can really help 04:17 Challenging the assumption that big up front planning could help you eliminate the risk of having to do rework and whether or not waterfall is actually supposed to do that 07:43 If we can’t eliminate the risk of not knowing everything up front, what can you do? 08:30 Devin puts on his architect hat - guardrails and guideposts 09:53 Reframing the problem 10:40 How physical building architects are still designing even after the building is built - you never know what the tenants of the building will actually want 11:48 The risk of making decisions too early 12:18 Advice from Devin on how to reduce your risk of designing architecture up front and put up the guardrails and guideposts you need 14:14 How architects look at the work and decision making 17:02 Making decisions at the last possible responsible moment 17:43 Having a growth mindset vs. a fixed mindset 19:10 Is there value in waiting to make your decisions until you have all the information? What is your cost of delay of waiting to make the decisions? 20:57 Devin’s upcoming events: Agile Budgeting and Cost Tracking for the PMI North Carolina Chapter on July 11 and PMI South Carolina on July 20 21:57 How to get in touch with Devin 22:47 Interview Ends Links from the podcast Does Agile addresses the 25 point Federal IT Reformation plan? (June 29) PMI Washington DC http://conta.cc/2sov4vn Agile: Budgeting for Agile Financial cost planning/tracking (July 11) PMI North Carolina http://bit.ly/2tmVMZz Jeff Bezos Memo about Cloud Services http://apievangelist.com/2012/01/12/the-secret-to-amazons-success-internal-apis/ Contacting Devin LeadingAgile: www.leadingagile.com/guides/devin-hedge/ Twitter: twitter.com/agiledevin LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/devinhedge Contacting Dave LeadingAgile: www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/ Email: dave.prior@leadingagile.com Twitter: twitter.com/mrsungo Personal Blog: drunkenpm.net LeadingAgile CSM & CSPO Classes For information on LeadingAgile’s upcoming public CSM and CSPO classes, please go to: www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/ Use the discount code: LA_Podcast to receive a 15% discount on the class. Feedback/Questions If you have comments on the podcast, or have questions for the LeadingAgile coaches that you’d like to have addressed in a future episode of LeadingAgile’s SoundNotes, you can reach Dave at dave.prior@leadingagile.com

One of the challenges many organizations face with Agile is how to handle long term strategic planning in a way that creates visibility all the way through to the execution level. TIES is an approach to Agile planning that can help the business engage in long term planning, understand their organization’s capacity to actually execute on the work, and then see how that work can be broken down into pieces that are sized to allow the individual teams to execute on them. In this episode of SoundNotes, Tom Churchwell explains how TIES can help with Agile Planning. Using this approach the work is sized into: - Themes - Strategic long term goals broken down into time boxes of 1 to 3 quarters. - Initiatives - Themes are broken down into elements that collectively address the theme. These are broken down into time boxes of 1 to 3 months. - Epics - Initiatives are broken down into Epics which would take between 1 to 3 sprints to deliver. - Stories - Epics are broken down into User Stories that are small enough to be completed by a Team within a Sprint, ideally within 1 to 3 days. Show Notes This is a pretty short podcast (less than 20 minutes) so I have not broken it down into timed show notes. Contacting Tom Churchwell LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/tom-churchwell/ Email: tom.churchwell@leadingagile.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/tchurchwell LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomchurchwell/ Contacting Dave LeadingAgile: http://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/ Email: dave.prior@leadingagile.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/mrsungo Personal Blog: http://drunkenpm.net LeadingAgile CSM & CSPO Classes For information on LeadingAgile’s upcoming public CSM and CSPO classes, please go to: http://www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/ Use the discount code: LA_Podcast to receive a 15% discount on the class. Feedback/Questions If you have comments on the podcast, or have questions for the LeadingAgile coaches that you’d like to have addressed in a future episode of LeadingAgile’s SoundNotes, you can reach Dave at dave.prior@leadingagile.com

Successfully completing a CSM or CSPO class doesn't impact everyone the same way. For some, it is like a lightbulb went off and everything about Agile just makes sense. For others (like me), some of the ideas and values from waterfall persist for a time. Questioning agile and trying to reconcile this new way of thinking with the old way is part of the personal journey of moving from a traditional approach to an agile way of working. I tend to think of it as a hangover that occurred from drinking a little too much waterfall. In this week's podcast, I address 3 questions that were submitted by a student following a recent class. These were the same kinds of questions I was asking when I took my CSM training and was getting my head around agile. In the podcast I address not only the questions that were asked, but the bigger ones that may be more subtext - around, why do we need to work this way? The questions: 1. What are the factors that lead us to the decision to go Agile or Waterfall? The simple "Scrum is best suited for complex projects" (page 10 of the workbook) doesn't seem to be enough and there could be challenges against that statement. The more complex the issue is, the more effort we would want to spend upfront instead of down the road. Is earlier we detect the issues the less cost to fix it? 2. We know a perfect scrum team should be cross functional but in reality, we're far from that. The question is how to fix the velocity gap between the roles to maximize their efficiency? E.g. developers code faster than testers (usually when the system is huge and a single change would require a lot of regression testing). We know we can fix it by adjusting the ratio among the roles but the amount of work changes overtime, if we keep adjusting the ratio we will NOT have a stable scrum team. 3. As User Stories do NOT contain the requirement details, the requirement is actually conveyed through discussion between PO vs Dev team, how can we capture the product specification? The Product Specification is extremely important for many purposes including training of new team member, doing impact analysis, or for PO to know how the current system works so they can plan for future improvement. Should we spend effort to compose/update Product Specs? If we do, will that be a User Story or just count it as overhead ? This is a pretty short podcast (less than 15 minutes) so I have not broken it down into timed show notes. Contacting Dave LeadingAgile: http://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/
 Twitter at http://twitter.com/mrsungo Personal site at: http://drunkenpm.net Feedback/Questions If you have comments on the podcast, or have questions for the LeadingAgile coaches that you’d like to have addressed in a future episode of LeadingAgile’s SoundNotes, you can reach Dave at dave.prior@leadingagile.com

This week Dave received a request for advice from a student in one of LeadingAgile’s Certified Scrum Product Owner classes: How to effectively work with a distributed scrum team (both time and distance). We have an IT Software project in which PO is in the US, Development is in Ukraine and Testing is in Vietnam. ShowNotes A summary of the suggestions Dave and Derek offer during the podcast: - Reorganize the team - Have additional POs or BAs in each location - Set up a US based team of rockstar POs who organize themselves specifically to support this distributed effort - Spend more time in backlog refinement and try to eliminate risk by taking as much are as possible to make sure the PBI’s area clearly defined enough for the teams to work on them (largely) without needing additional questions answered - Bring the entire team together for a time to establish patterns of communication and personal relationship, with the idea being that they are together for a time to shorten the feedback loop while they practice working together so that they can manage it better when they all go back home. - Team offsites to build the connection and create empathy between the disparate parts of the team - Online interaction - like the recent TDD Mobbing exercise Dave participated in on Twitch for Agile Uprising (https://youtu.be/4HX0JrnHSjI) Contacting Derek You can reach Derek on the LeadingAgile site at https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/derek-huether/ Via 
Email: derek@leadingagile.com On Twitter at https://twitter.com/derekhuether
 Or via his personal site at: http://www.derekhuether.com Contacting Dave You can reach Dave on the LeadingAgile site at http://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/
 On Twitter at http://twitter.com/mrsungo 
Or on his blog at: http://drunkenpm.net Feedback/Questions If you have comments on the podcast, or have questions for the LeadingAgile coaches that you’d like to have addressed in a future episode of LeadingAgile’s SoundNotes, you can reach Dave at dave.prior@leadingagile.com

Note: This is an audio only version of a video podcast that can be found here: http://bit.ly/2qiC2C5 Dave Prior and Derek Huether respond to a student question: What is wrong with management wanting to normalize points across teams and use them as time. Tools mentioned in the video Focused Objective - Troy Magennis has a wide variety of tools he makes available for free that will help you understand team performance (among other things). You can find them at http://focusedobjective.com/free-tools-resources/ or watch a video where Troy walks through how to use two of those tools... https://vimeo.com/190973081 LeanAgile Intelligence is another great tool that is worth checking out. It is an assessment tool that will help you understand team performance across the organization. You can learn more about it (and sign up for the free beta) at https://www.leanagileintelligence.com. You can also watch a video walkthrough that the tool's co-creator, Troy Lightfoot, gave to Dave recently in response to a question about how to evaluate performance of an individual ScrumMaster... https://vimeo.com/218602967 Contacting Derek You can reach Derek on the LeadingAgile site at https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/derek-huether/
Email: derek@leadingagile.com
On Twitter at https://twitter.com/derekhuether
Or on his personal site at: http://www.derekhuether.com Contacting Dave You can reach Dave on the LeadingAgile site at http://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/
On Twitter at http://twitter.com/mrsungo
Or on his personal site at: http://drunkenpm.net Feedback/Questions If you have comments on the podcast, or have questions for the LeadingAgile coaches that you’d like to have addressed in a future episode of LeadingAgile’s SoundNotes, you can reach Dave at dave.prior@leadingagile.com